Keyword: arrests

Five men and a woman which prosecutors said have links to far-right circles have been arrested in several locations across France on suspicion of preparing a 'violent' aatack against President Emmanuel Macron.

Six people have been detained in the north-east French city of Lille in connection with a series of recent attacks on nine commercial businesses there, including against a butchers shop and a McDonald's fast-food branch, when windows were smashed and fake blood was daubed on walls.

Alexandre Benalla (circled, with white hood) and Vincent Crase (circled right) during the arrest of a man in the Jardin des plantes on May 1st.

French President Emmanuel Macron’s security aide Alexandre Benalla, together with an employee of Macron’s ruling LREM party, Vincent Crase, were involved on May 1st in other incidents before they assaulted a man among May Day crowds at a square in the Latin Quarter of Paris. In a new video obtained by Mediapart, the two men, officially present alongside police as civilian “observers” of crowd-control operations that day, can be seen heavy-handedly joining in the arrest of a man at a public park. The new evidence of their violent and illegal behaviour that day further deepens the scandal of a suspected cover-up of their actions by the presidential office and senior police hierarchy.

Ten men, including a former gendarme, have been arrested across France for their suspected role in a plot to attack Muslims. Mediapart can reveal that one of the suspects had been setting up his own laboratory to make explosives. Matthieu Suc, Marine Turchi and Jacques Massey report on the story behind the dramatic arrests and the murky world of the far-right in France.

Arrests were made in operations across France but mainly on the island of Corsica, prosecution sources said.

Two Paris binmen who stole a truck from their service depot and attempted to empty the rubbish it was carrying outside the headquarter's of President Emmanuel Macron's political party were arrested in central Paris on Friday by gun-waving police.

French police on Tuesday arrested 16 people, including two women,  over their suspected involvement in an attack on two officers attempting to disperse an unauthorised wharehouse party in a Paris suburb last December 31st, when video published on social media showed a policewoman being kicked by a mob after she fell to the ground.

A woman police officer, together with her son and daughter, were among six people arrested for questioning over the murders in 2016 of a policeman and his partner, who worked in police adminstration, at their home west of Paris by a man who claimed he was acting in the name of the Islamic State group.

Friends of French nationals Hu Jiamin and his wife Marine Brossard, who were arrested together by plain clothes police during the Shenzhen-Hong Kong Biennale of Urbanism Architecture after painting a mural there in tribute to the late Chinese activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, say they cannot reach the couple and have no idea where they are being held.

An 36-year-old officer with the British border control agency Border Force was arrested in northern France along with three other Britons when handguns, ammunition, cocaine and heroin were found in their posession, in a joint operation into a suspected weapons and drugs smuggling ring by police in France and Britain. 

Five people have been detained for questioning over their suspected links to Ahmed Hanachi, 29, who was shot dead by an army security patrol after he murdered two young women outside St. Charles railway station in the southern French city of Marseille on Sunday in a knife attack which the Islamic State group later claimed responsibility for.

French interior minister Gérard Collomb said one of five people held for questioning after the discovery at the weekend of four gas bottles and a detonation device linked to a mobile phone at the foot of a residential building in a wealthy Paris neighbourhood is known to security services as a "radicalised" Islamist.

French judicial sources have confirmed that police have arrested two people on Wednesday in the Paris suburb of Villejuif where gas bottles and other components that can be used to make TATP explosives of the type used in recent terrorist attacks in France, Britain and Belgium were found in their flat.

The elderly relatives of Grégory Villemin, a four-year-old boy whose body was found in a river in eastern France after he disppeared from his family home, have been placed in custody for questioning, suspected of being the authors of poison-pen letters sent at the time of the murder, following an investigation by a specialist cold-case review unit of gendarmerie detectives.